Friday, 13 November 2009

Just a warning folks. I've just received the following from PlusNet that indicates there's going to be an excessively high amount of traffic this coming weekend, which will see the potential for reduced performance for all of their customers, including those such as myself that have the business package.

This is an update to the post we made a couple of days ago about the performance problems and speed issues that some customers have been experiencing during peak times when the network is busy.

We have seen an improvement in the performance of the network since carrying out some engineering work earlier in the week. Whilst feedback from customers seems more positive, we are aware that some of you are still experiencing problems with speed and network performance during the evenings.

There are still a number of unresolved problems that our engineers are working to fix and until this happens there will be the potential for things to slow down during peak hours, especially after 6.00pm.

We would like to make customers aware that there's a high possibility that the network will be *very* busy in the evening this coming Sunday and Monday. The BBC are streaming both Doctor Who and Top Gear in high definition and the ITV are also broadcasting I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and The X Factor. Whilst this might sound trivial, the last series of Top Gear that was broadcast in Standard Definition saw iPlayer traffic on our network jump from a base of around 700Mbps to 1.3Gbps. We're fairly confident that iPlayer traffic will exceed 2Gbps this weekend and possibly reach an all time high of 3Gbps+

Because of the above we will be switching back to 'Plan B' operation on Sunday and Monday evening - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/load.shtmlThis *will* result in degraded performance but should ensure that the quality of web browsing is not significantly affected. Some streaming services may be impacted by this dependent on the account type you are subscribed to.

We would like to extend our utmost thanks and appreciation to customers for their patience during these difficulties. We know it's not been pleasant for some of you however we'd like to assure you that we've been doing everything we can to address the issues.

Sorry once more for the continued inconvenience, we'll provide another update early next week.